The worst thing you’ll see all week: Pandemic

This shouldn’t bother me, but it does because there’s little else to keep me interested in Pandemic, a no-budget, half-assed, found-footage, zombie apocalypse hack job. The characters wear cameras mounted on their hazmat suits. The lens is situated above the clear face plate, about four inches over their heads. Pandemic is shot almost exclusively from the perspective of these cameras (occasional iPhone and security camera footage is edited in because why not?). Yet whenever a character looks at another character, the other character looks directly into the lens. Not at the person’s face, which would be well below the lens. But directly into the lens because it didn’t occur to the people making Pandemic that where an actor looks is an important part of making a movie. Hey, Pandemic filmmakers, it’s called an eyeline. Look into it.

While you’re looking into it, also look into casting (poor Alfie “Theon Greyjoy” Allen, whose tough but heroic convict belongs in a better movie), screenwriting (zombie apocalypses don’t get to magically ignore plausibility), CG (sticking a couple of half-hearted smoke effect overlays onto shots of Los Angeles doesn’t quite cut it), and especially production design. Pandemic features a garden-variety bright yellow school bus when the script obviously intends some sort of Damnation Alley battlewagon driven by an elite team of soldiers and scientists into a post-apocalyptic zombie infested city. It’s hilarious that this school bus has lightly frosted glass windows so the production design team doesn’t have to dress anything in post-apocalypse detritus during the driving scenes, which comprise about half of the movie’s running time. It’s even more hilarious when one of the characters insists he’s indispensable because he’s the only one “trained” to drive the vehicle. I spent many years riding these buses to and from school, and I well remember the kinds of people who were “trained” to drive these vehicles. I wouldn’t dream of having one of them deliver an elite team of soldiers and scientists into a zombie apocalypse.

Support Qt3 and watch Pandemic on Amazon.com. Actually, don’t. Instead, use the link to find something else worth watching. You’d have a hard time doing worse than Pandemic.

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